Way Makes Way

In her heart a woman plans her course, but the Lord establishes her steps.

Proverbs 16:9

In the spring of 2019, I was working through the Spiritual Exercises, a Spirit-led experience of Scripture and prayer based on the insights of St Ignatius. It’s a nine-month journey, replete with all the hope and joy and travails of a pregnancy. I remember knowing viscerally what the Spirit was birthing in me that season would be as life-altering as birthing a child. The final few days were laced with heightened anticipation, the sense that something was about to happen. I’m in a liminal space now, teetering on the edge of everything changing.

Everything has already changed.

Throughout the uncharted hours and trackless steps of this vast peculiar year, I’ve found myself reflecting on the nature of how God leads. This passage routinely comes to mind:

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away.

Mark 16:1-4

The women wake in the dark. A great sadness greets them, nebulous and frayed until the unwelcome details of the past two days crash in again, another roaring breaker to disorient and spin and fill their lungs with water. The brisk morning bites and scratches. Laden with spices and confusion and heavy hearts, they meet at the appointed place just as the Sun is rising and set off in silence. This was Mary’s idea. Mary, who refers to Jesus’ body still as her Lord (John 20:13). Mary, bent on honoring Him in the way she chooses. Mary, setting out without regard for the practical details. Finally someone says, “Who will roll the stone away?”

* * *

The women left for the tomb knowing there was a significant obstacle in the path ahead, one they didn’t have a strategy for, one they knew they didn’t have the ability to handle. But they went. And something else happened on the way.

It says something to me about how God seems to work. Humility is needed, because no matter how carefully and faithfully we discern our hearts and choose a direction with Holy Spirit, more often than not He puts something in our path as we go. Something we hadn’t considered, or weren’t earlier ready for. A very large stone, or something for which we couldn’t in our wildest dreams have dared hope: a very large stone rolled away. A sudden detour, gift or tragedy, that we don’t realize has shaped our muddy, malleable selves, until we are much further up the trail.

During the Exercises, my spiritual director gifted me the phrase ‘way makes way’. It’s over-quoted, but stay with me. Whether you understand the poem to be ironic or serious, and his emotions cool or agonized, the traveler in The Road Not Taken, noting how ‘way leads on to way’, decides based on what he can see—the first few meters of a trailhead.

But we aren’t to fix our eyes on what we see (2 Corinthians 4:18).

It’s easy to forget, in the heady rush of agency, we can’t know the full reverberations rippling outward from any single choice. Each makes ‘all the difference’ and yet—for we who entrust ourselves to a loving, sovereign Father—it makes no difference at all, because He steadily works not only our imperfect faithful choices into good, but our headlong epic errors. Like night hiking with a flashlight, all that is needed is to stay in the center of the ring of His light and walk confidently, even though He illuminates just a few steps ahead at a time.

Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light for my path.

Psalm 119:105